Reflection Modeling for Passive Stereo

Rahul Nair, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Daniel Kondermann, Carsten Rother; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 2291-2299

Stereo reconstruction in presence of reality faces many challenges that still need to be addressed. This paper considers reflections, which introduce incorrect matches due to the observation violating the diffuse-world assumption underlying the majority of stereo techniques. Unlike most existing work, which employ regularization or robust data terms to suppress such errors, we derive two least squares models from first principles that generalize diffuse world stereo and explicitly take reflections into account. These models are parametrized by depth, orientation and material properties, resulting in a total of up to 5 parameters per pixel that have to be estimated. Additionally large non-local interactions between viewed and reflected surface have to be taken into account. These two properties make inference of the model appear prohibitive, but we present evidence that inference is actually possible using a variant of patch match stereo.